


All Things Burned and Unforgiven

by thatsrightdollface



Category: Pyre (Video Game)
Genre: Character Study, Epilogue, F/M, Gen, Possible Character Death, going with the game's "Violent Revolution" ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-03
Updated: 2019-05-03
Packaged: 2020-02-16 17:02:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18695668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsrightdollface/pseuds/thatsrightdollface
Summary: Hedwyn, and the battle for the Archjustice's stronghold.  The world is being changed in fire.





	All Things Burned and Unforgiven

**Author's Note:**

> I... Only recently played Pyre, and I knew I was gonna write something about this game just a little while in, ahahaha. Hopefully this came out alright. I apologize for anything I might've messed up! 
> 
> In case you got a different ending, and never this one: if a player gets Hedwyn to Ascend but doesn't liberate enough Nightwings to have a peaceful revolution (we let the Fate win at one point, in my game...), the post-game summary of various characters' lives says Hedwyn and Fikani lead an attack on the Archjustice's stronghold. ... I was thinking a lot about that. :D
> 
> Please, have a wonderful day! :D

The whole Commonwealth had become the smell of fire to Hedwyn the Deserter, in that moment — the world felt like one ragged battle cry from so many throats.  He was leading an army, now...  Wearing ornate armor again, even, and ash in his red hair.  The Commonwealth was going to fall to ash too, ash under pounding boots and swept away by warrior wings.  Ash under a sky without stars.  If Hedwyn had anything to say about it, any prayers left, the Commonwealth was going to fall.

Heh.  For a while, Hedwyn had been sure he’d never even walk these streets again.  Never wave through shop windows, smirking, shopping bags swinging against his leg as he walked.  Never remember stories about his foster mother’s — Jodariel’s — triumphs in the Commonwealth’s eternal war without his insides sinking.  Without tasting anger and shame in the back of his throat, knowing all too completely how they’d both been thrown away.

Hedwyn’s anger had tasted like a low burning, too.  Always.  Even then, when he’d first been caught abandoning his post to consort with a witty, laughing Harp girl.  Hedwyn had been exiled and renamed for his crimes, and he’d learned himself again in the wastelands.  He gathered together some knowledge of the Rites, and collected stories he would tell that Harp — Fikani, her name was — if they ever met again.

Little moments, like what it had been like seeing moonlight swallowed up by the Deathless Tempest’s furious waves, holding his arms around himself as sea sickness threatened to send him leaning over the edge of their Blackwagon-ship again...  Knowing his companions were worried about him and someone might tentatively rub his shoulder as they walked by.

What it had been like cooking for the group, too, on less queasy days — listening to everybody’s voices filling that space just like their trinkets and decorations and memories from home could. Letting campfire heat and strange Downside-born spices fan over him, closing his eyes.

What it had been like when the Nightwings’ Reader — that was their team in the Rites, and she was their guide to the stars — carried the book of the Scribes over to Hedwyn’s side and offered to tell him stories from it if he wanted to hear. Offered to teach him the letters, too, if he was interested, so he could start stitching words together himself. Slowly, slowly.

Fikani would be glad Hedwyn hadn’t been alone, even exiled. He knew that, as well as he’d known she was worth risking everything for.

Now that Hedwyn had found Fikani again — now that Fikani had found Hedwyn, too — he saw how right he had been all over again.  She had joined him in this battle...  She had pulled him down so his head was in her lap, a wing folded over him, safe and dark and warm.  Feathers brushing his skin.  She’d wanted to know who he was, now, and find out what could still make him laugh.

“Tell me about this Reader of yours again: you’re _sure_ she wasn’t just looking down at that book and making up words?”

“So...  We’re going to meet Jodariel soon, are we?  Um.  Do you think she’ll hate me forever?  Please say she won’t hate me forever.”

Truth be told, Hedwyn would probably dream about the Rites every now and then for the rest of his life.  Part of him might always be wandering around the Downside, even once he’d found his way home.  He’d be there peeking over his friend the Reader’s shoulder as she read to him, squinting at cryptic symbols and trying to see them as anything more than a splatter of ancient ink.  He’d be there swinging the door open for Jodi after she’d fought off monsters in the night — helping heave her back into the Blackwagon with blood flecked on her huge curling horns...  He’d be joking around nervously with Rukey, too, that Cur who twirled his mustache even in exile and made quips when he felt like his team needed them.  His pack.  The Nightwings, whatever they meant now that the stars had gone out.

“The second coming of the Scribes,” people were saying.  The Commonwealth had been stirred into fire and revolution, after all.  “The second coming of the Scribes,” huh?

At the very least, Hedwyn knew he’d been chosen and trusted by the Reader despite that pesky “the Deserter” hitching a ride on his name.  The Reader had said she knew Hedwyn wouldn’t willingly abandon his friends to banishment, whatever the Archjustice would have anybody think about him.  She’d sent Hedwyn hurtling back to the Commonwealth first, though she’d also tapped her chin and murmured that everyone would miss his company.  Hedwyn had been the one to bring the Reader out of the desert when she was almost a pile of bones — she said she would never forget that.

“Exalted by the flame” – that’s what people said Hedwyn had been, in sacred music, in scandalous whispers.

In a way, wasn’t the whole burning Commonwealth meant to be “exalted by the flame,” now, though?  Changed and purified, its own self.  Reborn anew, at the ending of the Rites, as if the Scribes themselves had set all this in motion long ago.

...

Hedwyn had kept within earshot of the Harp Fikani throughout most of their raging battle, so far.  Most of the revolution, actually.  Hedwyn had only cooked for Fikani a handful of times, by now...  If they made it out alive — when they made it out alive? — he was going to bake her sweets he’d liked growing up fostered by Jodariel, and things he’d fantasized about being able to cook in the Downside, stuck somewhere frenzied and furious without any of the right ingredients. He was probably gonna replicate a few of his recipes from the Blackwagon as well as he could, too, when he worked up the nerve.  The Nightwings had been a part of Hedwyn for so long, by now; understanding him sort of meant understanding the Downside at least a little.  Fikani promised she wanted to understand.

Hedwyn wanted to understand Fikani, too, more than he knew how to say.  Maybe he had shown it...  Maybe his exile could serve as something like proof.  His knees had buckled when he’d found her again, meeting in a greasy sour-smelling back-alley street.  It had all come together faster than Hedwyn’d been afraid of, thanks to some connections Rukey Greentail scrounged up once he made his way back to the Commonwealth.  Hedwyn had barely remembered how to breathe.  Fikani was an open sky.  Hedwyn would tell her all his secrets, if only she asked.  She had helped catch him, then, actually, and chuckled, “Whoa there, you!  Careful,” softly into the crook of his neck.

Rukey had pretended not to watch, from the other side of the alley.  The very tip of his tail had been wagging, though.  Just the littlest bit.

Hedwyn could hear Fikani now, off and on, calling to her sisters; he could imagine her feathers catching dusky-bright in the firelight all around.  There would be so much blood hardening over Fikani’s talons, by this point, and he had seen her wipe her blades clean on intricate hanging tapestries, strung with mirrored scales and thread like liquid starlight.  She had watched Hedwyn swing his own blade, too, and — although he tried his best to be merciful, although he’d always wanted so badly to be kind — Fikani had seen the Commonwealth’s protectors drop to pieces at his feet.

But Fikani was not there when Hedwyn found the path to the Archjustice’s most hidden chambers.  She and her sisters were tearing the stronghold to scattered stones; the Archjustice had buried himself under the world, down a dripping tunnel lit only by fire from the streets above.  Hedwyn went with a few of his soldiers.  He wasn’t as afraid as he could have been.  Not anymore.

Hedwyn knew the Archjustice manifested himself as a gleaming, Scribe-blessed being in the Reader’s nightmares.  Tormenting her, heckling her with something like divine wrath — as if that divinity could truly be his to wield.  Hedwyn knew the way the Archjustice oversaw the Rites, taunting them all.  Cheering them on, and then praying for them to fail in a lofty drawl the Reader would mimic to him throwing her arms up.  Pretending like she was reciting gospel.

“Glory to the Scribes!”

“A glorious performance, I admit. More than I expected from the likes of you.”

“Fear not the cleansing flame!”

...  Yeah.  “Fear not,” and Androbeles IX of the Commonweath — Brighton, first, when he’d been ruined, too, exiled and throwing himself in Pyre after Pyre for his freedom, Brighton, always — was clearly so, so afraid.  Afraid enough to run.  Afraid enough to send his hordes, the way he had, and already knowing so many had died.

The Archjustice was older than Hedwyn had pictured him, at the end of the tunnel, in the unforgiven dark.  Past the traps and the ghosts, wading through such dirty waters to get here.  He wasn’t wearing his star-bright mask, the way he’d shown himself to the Reader.  The Archjustice was just a man, with his sword arm shaking and his legs grown stiff.  He was just a man who pretended he didn’t know it was cruel to throw people to the wastelands for every small sin.  Who pretended it was honor to exile anyone at all.  He tried to run even deeper, as Hedwyn and his troops took out those final guards.  Though, of course, well...  Of course there was nowhere left to run.

“You cannot know what you’re doing, Hedwyn the Deserter,” the Archjustice declared, and Hedwyn felt his lip twist up finally hearing that voice his own self.  “You have no right to judge me — I...  _I_ judge, as is the will of the Scribes!  Blessed be —”

“I always wondered what you sounded like, exactly, to the Reader,” Hedwyn murmured.  “It wasn’t right.  None of this was right.”

Hedwyn took a step closer, and his sword was sure in his hand.

When Hedwyn climbed back into the burning streets, again, it was with proof that the Archjustice’s fortress was no longer worth defending.  The war, it would appear, was nearly, nearly won.


End file.
